Lynch's law and disorder

David Lynch's compelling Mulholland Drive is that Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie lurking within every director, but its origins were inauspicious. It began three years ago when ABC-TV eagerly commissioned an open-ended, free-flowing television series along the lines of Twin Peaks, hated the pilot and shelved the project. A while later, the French company Canal Plus offered $2 million additional financing if Lynch would turn it into a cinematic movie and provide a satisfactory ending.

The title inevitably evokes Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, also in the noir mode but far less sinister. Sunset Boulevard stretches across Los Angeles from the Pacific to the old downtown area, passing through Bel Air and Beverly Hills as well as brasher commercial districts. The altogether darker Mulholland Drive zigzags along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains that divide North and South Hollywood. If you study Ken Schessler's perennial bestseller This Is Hollywood, you get the impression that Mulholland is redolent with evil, haunted by the sad and bad spirits of the stars and starlets who have been murdered, committed suicide or participated in orgies this past century.

Mulholland Drive Mansions, Errol Flynn's old place, has a reputation equal in notoriety to the Hellfire Club. The drive is named for William Mulholland, the ruthless Irish-born engineer who participated in the conspiracy to rob whole inland communities of their water that inspired Chinatown. The dam on nearby Lake Hollywood is named after him and alongside that is the vast Hollywood sign, from which the 24-year-old British actress Peg Entwistle hanged herself in 1932 when a studio declined to offer her a contract.

This, then, is the brooding setting of a picture that is as nightmarish and blackly comic as anything Lynch has made. It takes place over what appears to be 48 hours and centres on two women, an experienced brunette (Laura Elena Harring) and an ingenuous blonde (Naomi Watts), as in Blue Velvet. The brunette narrowly escapes death at the hands of hitmen taking her for a ride on Mulholland Drive; the blonde arrives hopefully from Canada to seek an acting career in what she calls 'the dreamplace'. They meet in an apartment near Mulholland belonging to the ingenue's absent aunt where the brunette has sought refuge when suffering amnesia after the accident in which her would-be killers perished. Time and identity fracture; people seem and, in some cases, are interchangeable. Thus, the flat looks unaltered since the Thirties or Forties, and the amnesiac brunette decides to call herself Rita after seeing a framed poster for Gilda on the wall. Eagerly, the blonde sets out doing auditions and volunteers to help Rita find her true self, using evidence from her handbag.

The women's investigative quest takes them to an apartment block where they discover a decomposing body, to a bizarre Hispanic nightclub called Silencio where everyone mimes to tapes, and into an erotic lesbian affair. Meanwhile, around them swirls a corrupt world of blackmailers, pimps, assassins, agents, directors, disfigured derelicts and hangers-on, who keep crossing each other's paths. A director is forced to give a leading role to an actress chosen by the Mob. In a brilliantly sustained sequence, an inept hitman kills his brother, the brother's secretary and a janitor at a seedy office block.

The sinuous camera constantly leads around menacing corners, and drags us down into lakes of satanic darkness. Death beckons as an end and an escape, and while everything is sharp, super-real, we know that this is a phantasmagoria. We're experiencing the horrors and excitements of somebody's dream, possibly a collective nightmare based on personal anxieties and the gurgling mulch of a community's knowledge of itself.

Curiously, the film that Mulholland Drive most readily brings to mind is the Coens' surreal Barton Fink, another story packed with echoes of scrofulous Tinseltown folklore and rumour in which an innocent in Hollywood becomes involved with someone who may be a projection of his anxieties and ends up disillusioned, suicidal, alone. The Coens remained tight-lipped and Lynch is giving nothing away. His own synopsis reads in toto: 'Part One: she found herself inside the perfect mystery; Part Two: a sad illusion; Part three: love.'

How do you judge performances in this context? The two central women - Watts and Harring - bring a certain vulnerable charm to their roles. Some - the 82-year-old Ann Miller, for instance - rely on their familiar faces. Others, keeping a straight face, go with the Lynchian flow.